Design and Evaluation of a Socket Emulator for Publish/Subscribe Networks

In order for a Future Internet architecture to be globally deployed, it must ensure that existing applications will continue to operate efficiently on top of it. As part of the Publish Subscribe Internet Routing Paradigm (PSIRP) project, we have explored various options for making endpoint centric applications based on the Sockets Application Programming Interface (API) compatible with the information centric PSIRP prototype implementation. We developed an emulator that mediates between the client/server socket calls and the publish/subscribe PSIRP calls, transforming the exchange of packets to distribution of publications. To assess the overhead of our emulator, we measure the execution time of a simple file transfer application in native socket mode, in emulated socket mode and in native publish/subscribe mode.